Hillbilly Elegy review: A sickeningly irresponsible parade of death and despair

Dir: Ron Howard. Starring: Glenn Close, Amy Adams, Gabriel Basso, Owen Asztalos, Haley Bennett, Freida Pinto. 15 cert, 116 mins

We should dread the return of Hillbilly Elegy. Netflix’s adaptation of JD Vance’s 2016 memoir, hailed by both liberal and conservative pundits as a magic mirror into the mind of white working-class Trump voters, will undoubtedly set off a second wave of uncritical adulation. Vance has been crowned as an emissary – his chronicle of a boy, descended from Appalachians who had migrated from eastern Kentucky to Ohio in the early 20th century, treated as the unvarnished truth of his people. But the lessons he offered were dangerously simplistic – and far too cruel. Placed now in the hands of serial sentimentalist Ron Howard, Hillbilly Elegy feels sickeningly irresponsible.

Vance’s writing is raw, vulnerable, and intrinsically empathetic. But his politics are deceptive – using “we” as a way to speak on behalf of all Appalachians, he declares that his people’s poverty is largely self-determined. If only the young men of his community didn’t shrug off hard work. If only the women didn’t waste their money and neglect their children. He spares no thought to mass unemployment, the collapse of government support, or the lack of healthcare. “These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else,” he writes. “We created them, only we can fix them.” There is only dead land here, without hope of rescue.

While Hillbilly Elegy sat comfortably at the top of the New York Times best-seller list, many other Appalachians worked hard to combat Vance’s assertions that these were communities without diversity, complexity, or promise. But Howard’s film will only make that fight harder. Cinema has a terrible habit of crystallising the personal into the universal. And while there’s no doubt the director, his cast and his crew have all approached this project with an ocean’s worth of empathy, the film bears a stubborn and immature refusal to engage with the ideas it’s propagating.

Screenwriter Vanessa Taylor carefully cuts out the most overtly political passages of Vance’s book – particularly his rant about how welfare recipients are all tricking the system so they can stock up on booze, cigarettes, and mobile phones. The Hollywood version trades resentment for sun-dappled tragedy and stirring violins, duly provided by composers Hans Zimmer and David Fleming. The camera runs around, thrusting itself into people’s faces, so eager is it to make its audience feel like they’re a part of this world. Moments of agony play out in mournful slow-motion.

And there is only agony – a parade of death, despair, and broken families. Bev Vance (Amy Adams), JD’s mother, may have graduated high school as a salutatorian, but an unplanned pregnancy cut short her promise. We see her become addicted to pills, then heroin. She loses her hospital job. She turns abusive. When she hits her daughter Lindsay (Haley Bennett), a young JD (Owen Asztalos) dramatically tosses aside his homework – and his future, it’s implied. Salvation comes in the form of JD’s hard-bitten “Mawmaw” (Glenn Close), who sits him down and tells him, without embellishment: “You got to decide, you want to be something or not?” We know the tough-love approach worked because we first meet JD as an adult (played by Gabriel Basso), a student at Yale Law School with a dependable girlfriend (Freida Pinto’s Usha) and a chance to work a summer internship.

There’s no performance here that doesn’t feel designed to please future Oscar voters. Basso is so sweetly naive, he’s borderline cherubic. Adams, whose wig frizzes and defrizzes with the ebbs and flows of her misery, commits wholeheartedly to crying, screaming, and melting into a self-pitying puddle. Close coughs, spits, and waddles. Her features have turned hard like a cliff face. She’ll spit out racism just mild enough to be passed off as a harmless quirk and violent threats that are just insincere enough to be treated as a joke. All this queasy poetry, this turning of poverty into a children’s fairy tale, feels reckless. The flashbacks to Middletown in its heyday, before the factories closed, are so rose-tinted – so utopian, even – that they stray into MAGA territory.

But most crucially, Howard’s adaptation has done nothing to combat the central ethos that made Vance’s work so damaging – the idea that the solution to poverty is for everyone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get to work. His film pivots on the half-hearted notion that “where we come from is who we are, but we choose every day who we become”, and that what separates Vance’s fate from his mother’s is purely down to personal choice. That’s a narrative that belongs to a writer who refuses to admit his larger place in the world – and a filmmaker who thinks that a positive outlook alone can fix the world.